


perpetual motion

by clytemnestras



Series: fem feb 2021 [2]
Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, Femslash February, Femslash February 2021
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29141655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: But now, there’s that itch under her skin. There’s that taste to the clean air, without the oily pollution of a city. There’s the market that they’re looking for, the answer that they’re looking for. There’s graffiti sprayed across a fro-yo shop,dreams are walking all around you.
Relationships: Hennessy/Helen Gansey, Jordan/Orla Sargent
Series: fem feb 2021 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2132580
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	perpetual motion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).



> for honesty's sake: I read cdth a year ago & am fuzzy on the details of Hennessy & Jordan's dynamic etc. so this might not actually work with canon at all
> 
> For the prompt at the [ficathon:](https://clockwork-hart1.dreamwidth.org/53291.html?view=1060907&posted=1#cmt1060907)  
>  _my body is a cage_

The worst part is when they don't leave, when Hennessy gets blind drunk and wanders off like a stray cat before she can kick them out and someone will wander into the kitchen whilst she's drinking her coffee with the paper and lay a long, tender kiss on her mirror-image of a mouth.

Jordan always has to shower, after, wash the resonance off. The other girls are mostly spectre, eternally soft-boned. Jordan is the one with substance, and that might be the worst thing of all.

  
  
  


Sometimes a mark is not a mark so much as a moneybank. An ease of access. 

Sometimes a mark is someone Hennessy likes the idea of rubbing off on, getting them a little dirty, staining the prestige. Helen is a lot of things, moneyed, clever, haughty, but she has an eye for beautiful things and a discreet mouth for beautiful girls.

It's a quick fling, a bustling New York affair, traversing private galleries and glitzy hotelrooms. Two girls in transit, only just meeting in the middle. They make a lot of money, and Jordan spends too many brunches pretending to know what life Hennessy has made up this time, filling in gaps and eating scones with French cream that simply isn't Cornish, and simply isn't _good_. 

Helen is a hot minute, brief and burning, and Hennessy keeps one of her black and pink Chanel cardigans like a trophy curled at the bottom of her bag. 

Then they burst through Henrietta, screaming and crying on the verge of total collapse and Jordan sees the familiar car glide past theirs, as pristine and unaffected as ever. Jordan thinks _fuck._ Thinks _bollocks_ . Thinks _we're all going to prison because Hennessy can't see a mistake until she's already made it_.

The air is different here, she can feel the charge of it, pulling at her delicate seams and threatening to unravel. They can all feel it, the girls buzzing, half intangible. 

The car passes without so much a flash of the lights and she remembers, then, what stuck out so much about Helen in the blur of New York. She was just as primed to leave, a rabbit-like spring to her movements. They were a passing fancy, a thing to be left behind.

Maybe Hennessy knew that all along. 

  
  
  


Helen won't be trouble unless Hennessy decides to make her trouble.

  
  
  
  


Hennessy decides to make her trouble.

  
  
  
  


They're loitering in the town, a place that feels like danger on the back of Jordan's neck. There's a flicker of the familiar around every corner, boys with haunted eyes, girls who move like nature is an inherent fact of their being. There's a strangeness, the kind of thing that makes Jordan want to _run._

Hennessy is usually the runner. She sees stability, she sees _comfortable_ and her eyes flare and she dreams again and there's another girl they have to hide inside them, another painting to get stuck under their nails, another skyline to memorise. Jordan is just the coattail, the shadow, along for the ride. She’d still if Hennessy knew how.

But now, there’s that itch under her skin. There’s that taste to the clean air, without the oily pollution of a city. There’s the market that they’re looking for, the answer that they’re looking for. There’s graffiti sprayed across a fro-yo shop, _dreams are walking all around you.  
_

There’s an ad for a psychic slicked up to a stop sign, an eye in a triangle, a phone number, an address. She snatches it down before Hennessy can see, but can’t bring herself to toss it. The phone number stains her wrist for a week, a mark that’s all her own.

  
  
  


She brings one of the newly acquired art history books to the cafe with her, one whose pages are brown and fragile as moth's wings. A girl curls up beside her, the yellow dress making her dark skin all the more noticeable. She feels a warmth, for a moment, feels less of a tall poppy in the whitebread suburbia, then panics when the warmth doesn’t subside. She’s gorgeous, is the thing, sipping on a macchiato and shuffling tarot cards between her hands. 

She looks at Jordan out of the corner of her eye and spreads the cards across the counter. “Pick one,” she says. 

Jordan hesitates, her fingers closed between the pages of the book. “It’s not really my thing,” she says, her accent still a shock in the midwestern air. 

“It won’t kill you,” the girl says, grinning. “Be a little daring.”

 _I’m not allowed to do that,_ she thinks. _That’s not my part to play._ She carefully places her hand on the cool plastic counter and slides across the glossy edges of the cards, worn and well used. A thousand lives could have passed across them. A thousand futures revealed. She feels a fissure of electricity and stops her hand, her middle finger drawing a card from the deck. She turns it over slowly, looking at the girl the whole time. 

“The moon,” she says with a contemplative look. “Everything is not what it seems. It’s a card for deception and magic and strangeness. You are not what you are.”

The card is beautiful and crude, a bone white woman clutching the stars, celestial bodies merging in carnal fashion. 

Sweat pricks at Jordan’s spine. She brings her mug to her mouth, like it could hide whatever her lips might reveal. “What I am is desperate for a caffeine fix.”

The girl squints her eyes. “That so?”

She scribbles something down on a napkin and slides it over, draining her coffee and fluttering away. 

It’s a name. It’s a number. Orla Sargent. The number she knows, couldn’t forget. She has been wearing it for days now. 

  
  
  


It takes four days of sitting on the apartment roof and feeling Henessy's nightly absence like a phantom limb before she makes the call.

It rings through, the first time, and she does scream, just a little, into her jacket, but not loudly enough to have the girls come looking for her.

  
  
  


Orla calls back a day later, and Jordan does not pick up, but does play the voicemail entirely too often.

_Something told me the person on the phone was dangerous. Or, maybe not dangerous, but not trustworthy. Something is terribly wrong with you, isn't it?_

There's a pause. She always inhales on the pause.

_You're not a fucking ghost, are you? Because we've already had to deal with the fallout of loving one of those in my house._

  
  
  


Jordan leaves a voicemail, too.

 _Not a ghost_ , she says. _Not technically, anyway._

  
  
  
  


She thinks of the word _loving_ and does not press the point, does not press the bruise.

Hennessy does come home bruised, littered with lovebites and her mouth downturned.

"The haughty bitch dumped us," she tells Jordan, dumping three heaping spoonfuls of sugar into coffee Jordan can almost feel burning through the lining of their stomachs. "She is engaged to be engaged with someone from a higher social standing and can't afford to keep giving me her cast off Gucci. Also, despite her more shadowy connections she was exactly no help on the market front. What a waste."

"What now?" Jordan asks, her stomach lurching as uneasily as the coffee does in Hennessey's cup.

Hennessey whistles _On The Road Again_ and pinches a corner store croissant from the packet on the counter.

So maybe she does press the bruise, a little. 

Presses call, a little.

Orla is humming the same song when she answers, and it makes her feel sick in the same part of her stomach that is overfull with butterflies, or maybe moths, a more destructive insect. 

"Do you want to go for a drink?" Jordan asks. "Right now?"

Orla laughs. "This is not my only offer tonight, baby. If you want me to come you have to promise me something."

"What?"

Her voice is clipped and serious. "Don't lie to me. I'm psychic. I can tell."

And Jordan is all lies, not an authentic bone in her dreamed up body, but she says yes, anyway.

  
  
  
  


Orla is sipping on a vanilla milkshake when Jordan arrives, which has a childish edge to it that almost grates against her. Jordan doesn't get to be childish, and it tastes a little bitter on the back of her tongue to see. 

She wants something a little heavier, something dark and strong. “Do they do whiskey here?”

It’s a sad hello, but it’s the best she’s got. 

"Only if the waitress is sweet on you," Orla says, voice like molasses. "Lucky for you." She waves to the girl in her blue pinafore, a barely-there quirk of her fingertips, and the girl blushes brightly. 

Jordan slides into the booth and rests her hands on her chin. “Okay, now I get it,” she says, watching Orla’s floaty orange dress pulse and drift in the aircon. “You’re all sunshine. I should wear dark glasses just to look at you.”

Orla sucks hard on her straw. "You're the one who pulled the moon. Two tragic lovers who cross the same sky but never the twain shall meet." She scans the plastic menu with a blunt fingernail, painted periwinkle blue. It should clash, but all it does is make her celestial. "Is that what you are?"

She sounds like Hennessy. Stars on the brain.

"I'm leaving town," she says, because that's true, and she does prefer to keep her promises. 

"I know," Orla says, and taps her nose with her pointer finger. "Psychic, remember. I could see your roadmap from over the phone."

 _She means it,_ _then_. Jordan thinks. They've met a lot of quacks and a lot of deluded women with too many crystal rings, women with their constellations inked across their arms and women with angel cards in every shape and colour. 

They've also seen a woman cut a literal red string of fate as the man beside her coughed blood until he couldn't so much as twitch.

She's not a dreamer, like Hennessy, can't sense the magic in someone's waters, but there _is_ something about Orla. More than the way the waitress trips over her own feet to talk to her, or the guys three booths over keep stealing looks. More than the way her own heart picks up, her own thighs clench, a little, when she closes her teeth around her straw and sucks.

"Do you… could you see why?" Jordan swishes the whiskey around in her glass to air it out, melt the ice a little. It's better a little chilly, or so she tells herself.

Orla tilts her head, her mouth pursed. "Reading you," she says, "is like looking through frosted glass. I can get a vague impression, get the colour but not the shape. I don't know what you are, but I know the fucked-up side of this town well enough to know you're not a person."

 _I am_ , the little girl voice in her head whines. _I am a person._ She feels like Wendy Darling clapping for fairies, even in her own head. "I'm person enough," she says wryly and takes a long drink. "Why did you come?"

"I see everything," Orla says, stirring the straw around in her glass. "All the good and all the bad crawling along everyone's faces. I was drawn in by the promise that someone might surprise me."

Jordan flushes. "And what would surprise you?"

Orla picks out a sugar packet and shakes it out onto the table, little grains of white covering the surface. "It doesn't count if I tell you," she says, her fingers drawing something intricate in the mess. "But it'd be nice to have a kiss I couldn't see coming."

Jordan laughs. "Tell me good small town girls like you don't kiss on the first date?"

"Nah," Orla replies, tongue poking from between her teeth, eyes lowered in concentration. "We do screw, though."

Jordan clutches her chest. "Good lord. How glad I am we don't get filth like you in merry old England."

"So that accent's real then?" Orla tears open another packet of sugar.

"Couldn't you tell?"

Orla just hums to herself, her hands carving through the sugar like water through sand.

When she pulls back, Orla has drawn a rose, exactly like the ones coiled around Jordan's shared throat, the throat she'd consciously hidden beneath a black polo neck. 

"It's beautiful," Jordan says, so she doesn't burst into tears.

"Yeah," Orla says. "I thought so, too."

  
  
  


She writes it down again, the number, pressed in dark ink on the lighter skin on the inside of her wrist.

Hennessy catches it when she's washing up, cleaning the mug they brought from home, hand-painted and chipped, the first copied thing Jordan ever made. She squeezes her wrist and holds it up to the light. "Not that I'm not impressed you're getting action," she says, but she doesn't look excited. "But you have to wash it off. We don't match."

And Jordan thinks, _yeah_ and dunks her hands into the soapy water. 

  
  
  


Orla leaves a message. _I saw you. But not you. Like you in a magnifying glass. What on earth are you up to?_

Jordan listens to it eleven times, one for every girl, then deletes the message.

She whistles _On The Road Again_ and stuffs her paints into a suitcase.

  
  
  


She thinks the same thing she thinks every time. _Next time I'll have something for myself._

But she won't.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr! [@bohemicns](http://www.bohemicns.tumblr.com), let's chat!


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